Don Martin planned a farewell tour across Canada after his cancer prognosis. Then, a faint hope appeared on the horizon.

Former Power Play host Don Martin talks about being told by his doctor that he had 12 to 18 months to live and the immunotherapy that treated his cancer.

Don Martin is a former host of CTV Power Play. He retired in 2019 and continued writing columns for CTVNews.ca until 2024.

After a pair of major surgeries, two years of immunotherapy and a daunting round of radiation, the results were in: The insidious beast was still alive and raging within me after a small mole on my neck, which had tested positive for malignant melanoma two years earlier, went metastatic into my lungs with spots on my scalp and hip.

The prognosis? “You’ve got 12 to 18 months,” my oncologist said with the weary empathy of someone who has delivered too many terminal verdicts too often.

It was a sucker punch to my soul as a bucket list of retirement adventures and experiences was abruptly kicked over.

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My mind recoiled at the thought of unborn grandchildren I’d never meet, family gatherings I’d never experience and how my granddaughter would not get her insistent wish of this grandfather at her wedding.

“Unless,” continued the oncologist, sensing my shock. “We can find you a clinical trial.”

And that was how my fight for survival began.

For a few months, it was a search in vain. Canada’s pre-eminent cancer treatment program at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre had no trials for my type of cancer.

My outreach to researchers in Britain, where promising mRNA vaccines for melanoma are being explored to harness the body’s individual immune systems to target tumour cells, wasn’t yet dealing with Stage 4 patients. And an experimental treatment in Pittsburgh was priced out of my comfort range at a cost of about $1 million.

Hope on the horizon

But then, a faint hope appeared on the horizon. I was invited to the Ottawa Cancer Centre to discuss becoming the last patient enrolled in phase one of an enhanced immunotherapy trial.

About 40 patients around the world would be given this bispecific drug, with no actual name beyond an alphanumeric label, designed to identify the cancer tumors and lock in the immunity cells to attack.

Now, phase one trials are not an ideal cancer treatment. It’s the first human testing stop after lab rats but, with the advent of more targeted treatments, the challenge now is more about finding the right doses and dealing with patient reactions than simply throwing a Hail Mary lifeline to all sorts of desperate last-resort cancer victims.

So, after several difficult months watching my daughters burst into heart-wrenching tears with every drop of bad news, making grim plans for an epic final family trip, plotting a farewell tour to friends across Canada and enduring a lot of what we labelled “JIC pix” (just in case photos) of me with everybody, I jumped at the opportunity to join this trial despite few assurances of success and the daunting likelihood of some very miserable side effects.

There would be weekly blood tests, reaction prevention injections, IV infusions, oncologist checkups and regular CT scans with a lot of questionnaires to list all manner of medical nasties, which could be triggered by the drug.

But the dreaded ritual of opening increasingly lousy CT scan results suddenly gave way to a theoretical possibility of a life extension.

The first scan results after the treatment began delivered “medium” good news, in the view of leading clinical trial oncologist Dr. Arif Ali Awan. The cancer was still growing, but the nodules had only increased in size by 22 per cent.

They usually halt the trial unless the nodule growth dips below 20 per cent, but Awan said it was up to me either to continue or stop the treatment. The results, he mused, could mean the nodules had shrunk from a spike which had been missed since the earlier scan. Or it could simply be the cancer was still relentlessly spreading. Without hesitation, I opted to continue with the trial.

Encouraging outcome

But when the next scan arrived, a miracle started to show up in the radiologist reporting. The nodules were slightly smaller and, even more encouraging, there were no new outbreaks of melanoma.

Now, 14 months after I was given a likely death sentence, scan after scan was starting to show the nodules shrinking or disappearing altogether. My scalp and hip outbreaks had vanished. And as Awan noted with considerable amazement, I was experiencing no side effects. Correction: There did seem to be one consequence of the treatment. My golf game suddenly improved.

Unfortunately, this particular clinical trial was cancelled last fall, although the pharmaceutical company kept supplying the drug to patients showing improvement and Health Canada agreed to cover the cost going forward. The results were simply not good enough for the company to move the drug to phase two trials before taking it through phase three to market.

Only a handful of this trial’s 40 patients from Canada, the U.S. and Europe experienced a halt or reduction in their cancer spread. And only one patient had his raging melanoma beaten into submission without any serious side effects. That patient is me.

But despite having results far below what the pharmaceutical industry needs to net a return on their costly research investment in this drug, governments must keep funding these trials, and cancer sufferers running low on options must continue enrolling in them, even if it appears they’re volunteering to be human guinea pigs.

What’s next?

“I’m of the strong opinion that if we don’t do clinical trials, then we would be stagnant,” Awan told me while I was awaiting my weekly infusion.

“We need to do them to show that treatments are getting better and patients are doing better so that, a few years down the road, these treatments become standard of care. It’s likely that many of our treatments don’t work, but some of them work really well, as in your case.”

So what’s next for me?

Well, every Monday is spent in the Ottawa Cancer Centre getting a miracle juice infusion under the watchful eyes of nurse angels Rayelle, Liz and Kathy. There are monthly CT scans and oncologist appointments to juggle.

It’s a challenge to schedule the longer retirement getaways my wife and I had planned, but it sure beats the alternative of going underground for good.

There are, of course, no guarantees the melanoma won’t resurface once the treatments stop in a year or two. But it’s unlikely that a body trained through drugs to hunt down and kill the cancer would suddenly stop the attack, Awan notes.

He studies my charts for a second and shakes his head. “Your cancer keeps shrinking. It’s 90 per cent smaller than the first time I saw you. I wish every patient was like you.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, such amazing success over long odds has given me a don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff, seize-every-day perspective on life.

We took that big family trip last winter - and it won’t be the last. We’re driving across western Canada this summer – and it’s no longer a farewell tour.

Family and friends don’t take pictures of me as if the next photo could be the last. Why, my extremely optimistic spouse is even planning my 80^th birthday party for 2036.

As for granddaughter Ali, aged 9, who insisted “You’ve got this Grandpa” in a get-well card after a particularly bad medical result?

Well, she may well see her very lucky grandfather sitting in the front row at her wedding with tears in his eyes and endless gratitude for a clinical trial that worked.